When James Gandolfini died last week at the chilling age of 51, most people I know took the news harder than they expected to. They suddenly realized that he was more than just another actor they’d watched and admired. He had entered their lives as Tony Soprano, the all-too-human mobster whose bathrobe would become as iconic as Chaplin’s bowler or that dress fluttering up above Marilyn Monroe’s thighs. And his death only underscored his humanity. While Tony himself seemed indestructible (whatever may have happened after things went black in The Sopranos’ notorious final episode), Gandolfini himself always seemed a surprisingly frail creature, a shy man who, wrestling with fame and the responsibility of playing one of the great characters in American pop culture, wound up struggling with drugs, divorce, overeating, flights of panic, and fear that he was forever trapped by the role that made him.

For many, his death carried added weight as a cultural touchstone. After all, Tony Soprano wasn’t simply the father of Meadow and Anthony, Jr. His show’s success made him the father of an entire generation of troubled, troublesome male TV characters whose rise and impact are deftly explored in **Brett Martin’**s terrific new book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

You only have to read a few pages to realize that Martin’s title has more than one meaning. Sure, Tony and Gandolfini were real pieces of work, but when it comes to being difficult, they had nothing on The Sopranos’ creator, David Chase, whose brilliance, Martin shows, comes with lashings of rage, paranoia, artistic ambition, and sheer cussedness. And he’s hardly alone. Just read the chapters on _The Wire’_s David Simon, _Deadwood’_s David Milch (who a female writer compares to Caligula!), and _Mad Men’_s Matthew Weiner, himself a child of The Sopranos. When it comes to being aggressive or ruthless, hard-asses like Avon Barksdale, Al Swearengen, and Don Draper have nothing on the show-runners (hideous term) who created them.

You’d never say the same of Ray Donovan, the new Showtime series (premiering Sunday night) created by Ann Biderman, late of Southland, who may not be difficult (I know nothing about her) but who certainly loves guys who are. This is a show where the impending physical violence never pends for long. Liev Schreiber stars as Ray, a transplanted Bostonian who now works in L.A. as a “fixer” for a big-time Hollywood law firm. He spends his days solving problems—the dead chick in the pro athlete’s bed, the macho action star caught with the transvestite hooker, etc.—and his methods make **George Clooney’**s Michael Clayton look like a wuss (to use Clintonian phrasing). Cross Ray Donovan and you’ll find him whomping you with a baseball bat.

But that’s only part of the show. You see, Ray Donovan is also a family drama, one that looks suspiciously like a West Coast reworking of The Sopranos. Nicely played by Schreiber, who always stirs some inner pain into his outer manliness, Ray is a sensitive thug with a big suburban home, a long-suffering wife, Abby (Paula Malcomson), who doesn’t like to think about what he does, a teenage daughter and younger son, a family-owned boxing gym (Bada Bing!), and a parent who’s out to get him—not his mom, like Tony Soprano, but his murderous, hypersexual ex-convict of a dad played by Jon Voight at his skeeviest (which is pretty darn skeevy, let me tell you). He’s also got an obscene boss à la Ari Gold, a female computer-whiz employee who might as well be wearing a dragon tattoo, and the obligatory cop who’s out to get him.

I’ve seen the first four episodes, and when Ray’s actually cleaning up messes, the show’s not bad. But when he’s not—boy, is the family stuff a tedious mess. If you’re like me, you’ve had it up to here with dim bulbs and sad sacks—in this case, Ray’s brothers, both damaged in one way or another—and as for Mickey Donovan, the family patriarch, Voight’s inhabiting some freaky alternate universe separate from the rest of the actors. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything less convincing this year than the scenes in which Ray’s naïve, spoiled kids are charmed and delighted by Mickey, a man so transparently creepy that any real teenager would be running for the Purell, if not the cops.

Still, you have to admire Biderman’s tenacity in making such a series, which remains tricky for women in the TV business. As Difficult Men rightly points out, the new century’s explosion of dramas about the dark side of masculinity has had few female counterparts (only Damages and, of course, Homeland). Hollywood obviously still prefers for its more daring female shows to be played for laughs, like Girls and Enlightened, and the latest entry, Devious Maids, which premiered last Sunday on Lifetime.

Based on the Mexican telenovela Ellas son...la Alegría del Hogar, this comic drama tells the story of five Latina maids who work in Beverly Hills for rich gringos who say things so toxically fatuous I’m surprised they don’t get lockjaw. There’s Rosie (Dania Ramirez), a widow raising the kid of an actress, Peri (Mariana Klaveno), while her own young son is stuck in Mexico. There’s Zoila (wry Judy Reyes ofScrubs fame) who works for the faded beauty, Genevieve (Susan Lucci), whose handsome young son, Remi (Drew Van Acker) is being pursed by the foxy maid, Valentina (Edy Ganem). There’s Carmen (Roselyn Sanchez) who went to work for a pop star (Matt Cedeño) so he’d listen to her music. And finally there’s Marisol (_Ugly Betty’_s Ana Ortiz), who takes a job with Michael and Taylor Stappord (Brett Cullen and Brianna Brown) in order to unravel the murder of a maid that opens the show.

Devious Maids is a great idea for a series, and not only because the major characters are Latinas (which makes it groundbreaking) and the actresses playing them superb. The show promises to dig into truths about social class that Americans don’t like to think about. After all, there are millions of domestic workers in the U.S., and we seldom see the world through their eyes. In Devious Maids, they’re the heroines, and at its best, the show takes us through the looking glass to show how a glossy potboiler like ­Revenge might seem from the servants’ quarters.

But based on the first episode, the show threatens to drown in a campy broadness that TV execs evidently think appropriate to women. The show was created by Marc Cherry, who did Desperate Housewives, and like his earlier show, it feels like a third-generation American copy of a minor movie by Pedro Almodóvar (who, as it happens, actually has a minor movie, I’m So Excited, opening on Friday). Devious Maids is a program that should be witty and trenchant, even subversive. Instead it’s thuddingly arch. About ten minutes in, I began praying that Cherry would scuttle the winking broadness and let his maids be as, well, difficult as the heroes in Mad Men, The Wire, and Breaking Bad—or at least the domestic staff in Downton Abbey. Heck, none of them are even particularly devious. This show makes The Help look as weighty as War and Peace.

Which brings us back to Gandolfini, among whose virtues was that he always took his characters seriously, and never condescended to them, whether he was playing the tired-out hit man in Killing Them Softly (one of his finest performances) or the voice of the huge, befurred Carol in Where the Wild Things Are. Of course, you could see this most clearly in The Sopranos, a show that in later seasons kept veering toward mobster/New Jersey shtick. What kept it tethered was Gandolfini, who always pulled back against the show’s slide toward comedy. He was playing a man of Shakespearean dimension, by God, and he wouldn’t betray him with triviality. His Tony was, like the rest of us, a welter of dreams, wounds, appetites, responsibilities, loves, and terrible mistakes—only his were writ larger than ours. Gandolfini made the role as big, juicy, and raw as his own inner life, and if you’d asked him to be arch, he would’ve clobbered you.